4 Levers For Brand Culture Change
The only way to ensure your brand is sustainable in the long run is by strengthening internal brand culture.
PROLOGUE
In August 2011, I had my first inside glimpse of Change Management from the perspective of one of the top consulting firms in the globe. We were advising the profusely bleeding, code blue national airline of Malaysia.
Some context for those unfamiliar with Malaysia Airlines.
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Ahmad Jauhari Yahya was appointed as CEO of Malaysia Airlines (MAS) from September 2011 to April 2015. According to Bursa Malaysia records, the total loss for MAS between this period was RM4.22 Billion.
To put it into perspective, the median salary for Malaysians in 2011 to 2015 was RM1,500 monthly. MAS could have hypothetically employed 351 thousand Malaysians (that’s 1% of Malaysia’s entire population) and paid them double the median salary for 4 years with the amount they lost.
Christoph Mueller, saviour of Irish airline’s Aer Lingus, replaced Ahmad Jauhari Yahya as CEO of MAS in May 2015. Mueller’s infamous cut-throat move came just 1 month later where 20,000 MAS employees received termination letters with 14,000 immediately receiving new employment with revised terms while the remaining 6,000 had no option but to seek employment elsewhere.
This wasn’t the first time for MAS. Between 2005 and 2009, Idris Jala, a Malaysian hero who led MAS to a record RM852 Million in profit in 2007, introduced a restructuring scheme that cut the workforce down from 23,000 to 20,000.
Fast forward to 2024, Malaysia Aviation Group (MAG), the parent company of MAS, recorded a RM54 million profit, achieving its third consecutive year of positive operating profit with 13,000 team members.
Change was hard to come by.
Because culture was hard to change.
The momentary turnaround brought by Idris Jala was a profit and loss masterclass but did not address the deeply rooted issues within the MAS workforce culture. His voluntary separation scheme might have helped a little but the years under Ahmad Jauhari Yahya was telling of the rot that was lingering.
Mueller knew. And this German doesn’t meander.
He saw staff literally sleeping on the job.
So he did what no Malaysian (who wanted to continue having a career in this nation) had the gumption to do.
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My short 5 months as an analyst in MAS was focused on post-go-live support efforts for their call center that had a recent CRM software change. It did not take long for me to notice all the red flags:
Staff on payroll who have never appeared or done any work for over 2 years due to ‘personal issues’.
Staff who stroll in at any time they please and left for tea or toilet breaks for hours.
Staff who would literally lie to the customer about connection issues and disconnect a perfectly fine call, knowing full well their screen and call is being recorded.
Staff that threaten leads to ‘take it to the union’.
Leads who, on a daily basis, make light of data and risk management best practices while making calls based on GFM. Gut Feel Methodology. Their words, not mine.
Because I witnessed all these firsthand, the journey for MAS is one of the reasons I truly believe that
nurturing a good internal brand and culture is the only sustainable way to safeguard a company and protect its legacy.
If you’re interested to know where MAS has landed on culture today, just scroll all the way down to the end!
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CULTURE CHANGE FOR BRANDS
Culture according to the American Psychological Association (APA)
culture
noun.
the values, beliefs, language, rituals, traditions, and other behaviours that are passed from one generation to another within any social group. Broad definitions include any socially definable group with its own set of values, behaviors, and beliefs. Accordingly, cultural groups could include groups based on shared identities such as ethnicity (e.g., German American, Blackfoot, Algerian American), gender (e.g., women, men, transgender, gender-nonconforming), sexual orientation (e.g., gay, lesbian, bisexual), and socioeconomic class (e.g., poor, working class, middle class, wealthy).
the characteristic attitudes and behaviours of a particular group within society, such as a profession, social class, or age group.
When brands speak about culture, do they treat it as an ephemeral goal or are they describing reality?
Brands concerned about making culture REAL, will need to understand the levers that exist that will actually move culture.
These are 4 levers that are critical for culture change.
TOP-DOWN, Driven by leadership
BOTTOM-UP, Driven by the people
BEFORE THE START, For new hires
AFTER THE END, For alumni
TOP-DOWN
Malaysia is consistently the highest scorer in Geert Hofstede’s Power Distance Index (PDI), measuring 100–104 consistently across the years. This means that Malaysians generally have a strong sense of hierarchy and subordinates expect to be guided and directed i.e. Malaysian firms generally require more of a Top-Down approach when it comes to change.
If leaders aren’t walking the talk, obedience and compliance will still follow albeit begrudgingly, and real change will be glacial. Monkey see, monkey do.
My hypothesis is that PDI can proxy how successful your change is going to be when using a Top-Down approach. The higher the PDI, the more successful a Top-Down approach is going to be.
BOTTOM-UP
How do we make bottom-up culture building practical?
Encourage your people to set personal goals, no matter how tiny, that are coherent to your company’s culture.
Have peers cheer one another on and keep one another accountable for these goals.
While these goals need to be self-initiated, firms can make it as easy as possible by:
Providing the resources. Eg. Believe in serving the community? Firms like Accenture provides Managers and above, a set amount of funds every year to contribute to a charity or cause of their choice.
Providing the space. Eg. Believe in innovation? Firms like Google have a ‘20% rule’ that allows staff to work on personal projects or learn a new skill during their work hours.
BEFORE THE START
Firms can set themselves up for success by earnestly searching for a culture fit right from the hiring stage. Now this is tricky because anyone looking for a job will have all the right answers and would always portray themselves to be a perfect fit to the culture.
My recruitment and HR friends have a myriad of methods and tools they use to assess culture fit and one of the steps in these assessments that I would like to highlight would be incorporating the Meaning-Making Model as part of your process.
This model distinguishes two major levels of meaning:
Global meaning: your potential hire’s overarching meaning system i.e. beliefs, goals, values, sense of purpose, & identity.
Situational meaning: how your potential hire appraises a specific event or situation when it does not fit their global meaning.
It would be ideal if the company culture and the potential hire’s global meaning system aligns 100% but that’s going to be really rare.
So we need to zone in on understanding how they react and respond to areas that DO NOT align. This is helpful to predict not only their own behaviour but also how they would manage others who come to them with wayward behaviour.
Hire for attitude and aptitude. Not just for the latter.
AFTER THE END
An alumni program is something many brands neglect.
But what better validation of culture would a brand or firm need than a glowing testimonial from someone who has built their career there and still wants to stay in touch?
What better way is there to encourage your existing people by having them hear from those who have walked the same path prior?
The culture lives on within every single person who has exemplified the brand during their stay and should continue to be nurtured even after they have left.
Build more bridges instead of burning them.
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EPILOGUE
Group Managing Director of MAG, Datuk Captain Izham Ismail attributed the positive performance from 2022 to 2024 to the modernized fleet, strengthened global network and growing non-airline businesses.
Behind the scenes?
A culture of servant leadership. He thinks leaders should be "servants" for both the organization's staff, as well as its customers.
A growth mindset and safe, open workspace. Ismail believes it's OK to make mistakes: "The more you fail, the faster you learn."
Formally, the MAG Family embodies Malaysian Hospitality through their culture principles of inspiring trust, dreaming big, and making Malaysia proud.
All signs point to a culture that is changing for the better.
As a Malaysian, I’m proud to see our national airlines soaring again and I’m hoping this success will last a lifetime!